NEW Iron Man 3 TRAILER! | Interview With Kevin Feige President of Marvel | #DisneyOzEvent

SO… here you have some insight from the President of Marvel himself on Tony Stark, Pepper, how Marvel is such a great brand for families and a little of the storyline from Iron Man 3.  

 
Q    :   Any questions for Kevin about the film, or Marvel or anything like that?
 
Q    :    I have a question.  When Tony is working with the little boy Ty… 
   
Kevin   :    The character’s name is Harley.
 
Q    :    Harley.  Do you see a lot of smart-aleckness of Tony Stark in him, with the little boy, or did you soften it up and you miss some of that? 
  
Kevin   :    Uh, no.  He is quite the smart-aleck with the little boy, oh yes.  Um, and he’s sort of- the boy is shocked at first, and then slowly begins to sort of give as good as he gets from Tony.  So that- that certainly continues. 
 

Q    :    Women and action movies are not necessarily words that are synonymous, but Marvel has really done a good job of getting women interested.  Avengers was something women were really drawn to.  How much thought do you put into bringing the female audience in? 
  
Kevin   :    Well, I mean we want these movies to play for everyone.  We think they are for everyone.  And I don’t know that we necessarily sit down and go, how do we make men like this movie?  How do we make women like this movie?  We don’t- we don’t do that.  Um, but part of what we love about our characters is they’re human, they’re flawed.  They react even with aliens coming at them and armored suits flying at them and villains shooting rays at them.  The way they respond to those situations, we try to make it as emotionally truthful as possible.

 
So we want the most fantastic thing to be the outer space elements of Avengers.  The advanced technology of Iron Man.  Let that be the comic book element.  But the human interaction should be real.  It should be as real as possible.  I think that appeals to people who might not just love the explosions and the loud noises and the clacking and the repulsing.  In this franchise in particular, and it’s sort of unique, frankly.  This is now the fourth movie if you count Avengers with Iron Man. And he’s been with the same woman the whole time, and the relationship just grows.  The relationship gets deeper and deeper.  And in this film they live together.  You saw a little bit of the- of the banter with Rebecca Hall who plays a new character, Maya.  But the truth of the matter is, the love triangle in this movie is really between Tony, Pepper and the suits.  Tony, Pepper and his obsession with those suits, and the obsession with technology.  Um, and it’s sort of unique for a big superhero Summer blockbuster franchise to have, I think, that kind of layers. 
 
And that really is…yes there’s a bad guy, yes the stakes are very, very high, the President of the United States is in danger.  You saw in the trailer Air Force One is attacked.  There are big stakes to this movie.  But the real stakes are, is Tony going to be able to set aside the obsession to spend all day, every day in that workshop, tinkering with the suits, um, in order to focus on, as he says in the trailer, the one thing that matters most – Pepper.  Um, and that actually is what the entire movie’s about. 
 
Um, and that’s what- as we lead into the finale, yes he has to save the world, but it’s really about the relationship between those two.  Which, it was not the case with James Bond or Indiana Jones or pick your leading male hero.  So I think that’s- that’s unique.  But that’s also what it is in the comics.  And that’s what we want to bring to life on the screen.
 
Q    :    Can you talk about Marvel working with Disney?

Kevin  :    Well, I’ll tell you a few things.  One is, I’m obsessed with Disney and with Disney theme parks, and when I was first told by the heads of Marvel, that, uh… what do you think of Disney?  We’re thinking of selling the company.  I was like…I pulled out my wallet, I got the- the annual pass, the Disney DVC membership, all of that stuff because I was just obsessed with it.  That’s what my family did, was go to the Disney theme parks every year.  And still do, over New Years down in Florida. 
 
So I sort of loved that, and I thought it was great.  But I thought…and I understood why they wanted us, because they didn’t have necessarily things for boys and for that market.  And they were very great in early meetings we had with them.  They said, like Pixar, we like what you’re doing.  We want you to keep doing what you’re doing.  And that was, I don’t know, two years ago now.  Two or three years ago.  And that has certainly held true.  They’ve let us make the movies we want to make the way we make them. 
  
The best thing, and Avengers is the perfect example of it, is what they can tap into.  Groups like yourselves.  All of the marketing that they bring to it.  The passion that they bring to it.  They did a spectacular job with marketing the Avengers.  And tapping into everything that a company as huge as Disney can do.  But at the same time, what I love most about them is, despite it being the biggest entertainment conglomerate on earth, I think it is, it’s Disney.  And it can be very personal.  
 
And as we get into more of the parks and things like that, I want kids to be able to come experience Marvel the way I would go experience the Disney parks.  Uh, and still do.  So it’s been very positive in the fact that we have a home now.  Well, the first Iron Man film, the second Iron Man film, for Captain America were distributed by another studio, who did a very good job with those movies, but it was just sort of a side arrangement we had with them.  We were one of a number of things they were distributing. 
  
It is clearly a family here with Disney and they put everything into it when the movie comes out.

 
Q    :    As a mother of two teenagers, I appreciate you’re having a positive role model, as far as modeling relationships.  Is that something you intended from the beginning? 
  
Kevin   :    Well, you know to Tony, Pepper, was always the most important relationship to Tony Stark in the comics.  That’s not always true with, uh, I guess Clark Kent has Lois Lane, right.  That said.  Um, a lot of the other characters don’t have that.  The Marvel characters sort of do.  Thor has the Natalie Portman character who continues into the next Thor film.  Um, so we do, you know, pull it all from the comics and that is what it was.  It really was- it was fun to us in the beginning of Iron Man 1. He goes to Vegas, he sleeps with a reporter to sort of set up that, so that the relationship with Pepper, there’s a flashback at the beginning of this movie with the Rebecca Hall character that shows what he was like many years ago, before he became Iron Man.  And you see a little bit of that playboy.  But the fact is, you always want to remind audiences of that side of him, so you can appreciate how, sort of mature he’s getting.  That he’s putting all that aside to be with her.  The other thing is, the chemistry between Robert and Gwyneth is spectacular. 
 

And, we just want to keep…it’s…with each movie we go, okay, do we want to bring her back?  Yes, of course.  Because it’s just so- so strong.  You know, the marketing to Avengers, you may remember the big line Steve Rogers, Captain America says, you know – without a suit of armor what are you?  And he says, billionaire playboy, philanthropist, whatever.  Um, and even Robert would go, I’m not really a playboy anymore.  And I’d say, the line’s good, it’s okay.  It’s fun.  But even he was like, I’m not really a playboy.  And he’s not. 
 
And even in Avengers, you can tell how close he is with Pepper and that, in those few scenes together.  When he’s flying up to save the planet, he calls her.  That’s the one call.  So we just love, frankly, that it’s unique in these kind of movies.  We think it’s an important relationship between them.

 
Q    :    Avengers was marketed towards families, this one seems a little more intense.  How do you perceive the marketing? 
 
Kevin   :    Well, all of our movies are PG-13.  I know parents who take their four year olds, and I know parents who won’t let their kids see them until they’re thirteen.  So that really, it all, you know, depends on that.  For us, there are things you can do if you are going by the letter of the law in a PG-13 movie.  There’s a level of violence you can add, there’s a level of sexuality you can have, there’s a level of language you can have.  We never go anywhere near the top of that.  Because we don’t want to.  Because that’s not what our characters are about. 

 
When you have the amount of fighting and explosions and some blood on his nose when he puts the suit on, we do want that.  We want it to be real.  Otherwise it’s just a CG thing hitting a CG person.  So that’s why we’re always in that PG-13 range.  Jon Favreau on the first two movies, Joss Whedon on the Avengers, myself… we have kids.  We want to be able to take our kids to these movies and enjoy them.  It’s really the level of intensity that determines, you know, whether parents are comfortable taking their kids to it as opposed to content, necessarily. 
 

In terms of the marketing of this movie, if you go back and look at the marketing of Avengers, it’s a much…it promises a much darker important movie than the movie actually is.  The movie is much more fun than the trailer would show.  Same thing with this.  This trailer is, he’s being blown apart, his life is at stake, how will he get out of it?  The movie is much, much funner.  Much more fun than that, but that’s what gets people into the audience.  Is he gonna get killed – I gotta go see this.  What’s gonna happen?  Thank goodness, that’s what we want.  
  
Um, in terms of what differentiates it, I mean I do think that- that there’s a legacy with Marvel, and there’s a history with Marvel.  And you have grandparents and parents and kids and little kids that know them whether they read them,, you know…  I’ve met people that are eighty years old, ninety years old, that talk about reading a Captain American comic in the…I don’t know if they were actually in the trenches, but somewhere- at some point in World War II.  And I had a three year old nephew, and I have a four year old daughter who asked me all about Iron Man. Does he fly?  Is he a robot?  Is he–  What is it?  Because of the toys.  Or because of the pajamas, or because of the shoes.  I love that about Marvel.  I love that it can stay cool and relevant from a two year old to a twelve year old to a twenty-two year old to a ninety-two year old.  That’s important to us. 

How do we do it differently?  I can’t really tell you, other than to say, we always just focus on the character.  It always starts with, what do want this character to go through?  What mission do we want the character…?  What emotional sort of depth and growth do we want him to go through?  Then we think of all the cool stuff to- to put him through, as opposed to, oh I always wanted to see Iron Man’s house fall into the sea.  We don’t start there.  We start with, what is the character journey we want to take him on?  And we really do.  We call him Tony Stark, not Iron Man.  When we’re just in our own meetings, we refer to Captain America as Steve.  We refer to Thor as Thor.  We refer to… Hulk as Bruce.  Because these are, you know, real people that we want to- to continue to flush out movie to movie to movie.

 
Q    :    Any chance of Pepper taking on more time in the suit and become a character herself? 
  
Kevin   :    I will tell you this.  In this movie we play with the convention of the damsel in distress.  We don’t necessarily- we are bored by the damsel in distress.  But sometimes you want, we need our hero to be desperate enough in fighting for something other than just his own life.  So, there is fun to be had with, is Pepper in danger or is Pepper the savior?   
  
In terms of where we go with future movies, we’ll see.  In the comic books she does get a taste for the suit and becomes her own hero named Rescue, who doesn’t necessarily battle other people, but it is on missions to help people and to save people.  Will we do that down the line with Gwyneth Paltrow?  Who knows.  But it’s certainly something…her being in the suit is something we have been playing with since Iron Man 2.  We did some designs and it didn’t end up fitting in that movie.  But, but the little taste you saw here is something that we’re- we’re certainly interested in.